Things must become "essential"

Wednesday, November 20, 2013 6:35 PM UTC

...and they do!

Today is a public holiday here in Saxony, Germany, and I had the time to watch the amazing webinar from OpenNTF regarding the new project called "OpenNTF Essentials". It's actually the whole bunch of all the cool extensions for XPages developers combined in one package. Installation is very simple as they come as an update site and are packed with all the demo applications and documentations. So if you download the ~100MB package and unzip it you receive everything the community developed within the last years - a great idea to start over with rapid application development for the IBM Domino platform!

Christian Güdemann showed also a demo of some demo apps and even wanted to change the default OneUI theme of the POI4XPages app - but failed as he chose the wrong theme name in the XSP properties file. But no problem as there was help within the live chat during the session. I never attended an OpenNTF webinar with so many attendees - up to 75 people joined the show. A great success, congratulations!

As you can see I picked up the idea of the Bootstrap4XPages plugin again for this site. Though I only use standard UI elements from the Extension Library the site is now "Bootstrap"-ed again (my former site was coded manually to Bootstrap). So it now looks familiar and maybe Mark Leusink's "Bootstrap4XPages" website can add the link to my page - again.

OpenNTF has driven XPages development to a new level within the last years and there is hope that IBM may integrate some (or all?) of the great projects into the standard package of Domino and Notes as they did in release 9 with the ExtLib.